“Friends.”
SINS OF THE FATHER
You can know things without them being said out loud.
I knew Sohrab and I were going to be friends for life.
Sometimes you can just tell that kind of thing.
I knew my dad wished I was more like him. Our problems went deeper than my hair and my weight. It was everything about me: the outfits I picked for school photos, the messiness of my bedroom, even how inaccurately I used to follow the directions on my LEGO sets.
Stephen Kellner was a firm believer in adhering to the included directions, which had been diligently prepared by a professional LEGO engineer. Designing my own models was tantamount to architectural blasphemy.
Another thing I knew:
I knew my sister, Laleh, wasn’t an accident.
A lot of people thought so, because she was eight years younger than me, and my parents weren’t “trying for another child,” which is kind of gross if you think about it. But she was not an accident.
She was a replacement. An upgrade. I knew that without anyone saying it out loud.
And I knew Stephen Kellner was relieved to have another chance, a new child who wouldn’t be such a disappointment. It was written across his face every time he smiled at her. Every time he sighed at me.
I didn’t blame Laleh for that.
I really didn’t.
But sometimes I wondered if I was the one who was an accident.
That’s normal.
Right?
You can learn things without them being said out loud too.
That night at dinner, I learned Ardeshir Bahrami did not like Stephen Kellner very much. At all.
Maybe it was because Mom stayed in America for Dad. She left her family, her country, her father, for Stephen Kellner.
Maybe it was because Ardeshir Bahrami—a True Persian in every sense of the word—was culturally predisposed to reject any and all Teutonic influences intruding on his Iranian family.
Maybe it was because Dad was a secular humanist, and Babou was religiously predisposed to dislike him. Zoroastrianism is patrilineal, which meant that even though Mom had inherited Babou’s religion, she couldn’t pass it on to me and Laleh.
Maybe it was all three.
We sat around Mamou’s dining room table—Sohrab stayed to eat with us, once the sun had set—and somehow Dad had ended up seated next to Babou, who had decided to keep up a running commentary on the meal.
“You probably don’t like this stew, Stephen.” he said. “Most Americans don’t like fesenjoon.”
“I love it,” Dad said. “It’s my favorite. Shirin taught me how to make it.”
It was true: Dad really did love it.
And fesenjoon is a hard food to love at first.
It kind of looks like mud.
Worse than mud, even: It looks like the sort of primordial goo that could generate new amino acids, which would inevitably combine to initiate protein synthesis and create brand new life forms.
